Elsa, Week 15 - The Mandela Effect
With all the technological advancements and new discoveries that humans have made in the past 300,000 years, it seems like the one area where we still lack so much information is with the human brain. It’s kind of funny—we have so many brains that work on and research this problem everyday, yet we still can’t even figure out how one of them works! We don’t know what our brains are made of, how our memories are stored, or even how we’ve formed consciousness and intelligence. But for me, one of the most interesting mysteries of our brain involves the Mandela Effect.
The Berenstein Bears. The cornucopia in the Fruit of the Loom logo. Curious George’s tail. The Monopoly Man’s monocle.
These descriptions seem familiar, right? It’s what we’ve all grown up with and what we all remember, where we’re able to clearly imagine these images whenever someone mentions them. But what if I told you that none of what I’ve listed is real?
It’s actually spelled The Berenstain Bears, with an “a” and not an “e.” There has never been a cornucopia in the Fruit of the Loom logo. Curious George has always been tail-less, and the Monopoly Man apparently has perfect vision because he’s never had a monocle before!
So why have we all collectively decided to remember the wrong images? There have been many theories about why the Mandela Effect occurs, ranging from logical research done on the brain to absurd propositions such as the Large Hadron Collider opening up a portal. I came across many interesting theories while doing research for this blog post, and I’d like to share some of my favorite ones with you guys:
False Memories: The most widely accepted explanation for the Mandela Effect highlights how we sometimes just remember things wrong because our brains make over-generalizations when trying to recall information. For example, those that remember Alexander Hamilton as being a president might do so because their memory of him is stored with the faces of other founding fathers who became presidents.
Confabulation: Our brain just likes to make up stuff when we can’t remember something. We try to “fill in the gaps” to make more sense of our memories, such as when an APENG student writes random information in their argument essay to try to convince themselves that their thesis makes sense.
Parallel Universes: Some believe that multiple realities of our world exist, where our universe splits into parallel universes that have different timelines. Maybe we’ve shifted to a different timeline where small changes in our reality exist, such as a world where Pikachu’s tail is completely yellow instead of it being black at the tip.
Government Experiment: I can’t find an article about this theory on Google (maybe because the government has removed all of them), but many people on social media are under the assumption that this effect is caused by government involvement. They believe that these changes to famous images and descriptions are part of a government experiment attempting to manipulate our memories and perceptions of our reality.
It’s difficult to really know why we experience the Mandela Effect, and I doubt that we’ll ever have a clear answer in the near future. For me personally, however, I believe that it’s highly unlikely that it’s just because our brain makes mistakes, because there’s no way that everyone in the world somehow remembers the same false image. But I don’t know; this might just be because I love conspiracy theories.
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Hey Elsa! I also love conspiracy theories! The first time I ever heard about the Mandela Effect was on a Youtube video talking about parallel universes, so that is the theory I am most familiar with! In that same video, they also discussed a man called John Zegrus who had a passport from a country that does not exist. If that sounds interesting, I would definitely recommend looking into him some more because it's pretty cool!
ReplyDeleteI also agree with you that the Mandela Effect is highly unlikely to be caused by coincidence or mistake, but if I had to pick the most probable theory it would be the false memories theory just because our brain often comes up with its own explanations for all sorts of things. I loved reading your blog this week Elsa! Thank you for sharing.
Hey Elsa, this blog was insanely interesting since I am a victim to the collective memory of certain depictions of products. I never knew that the Fruit of the Loom logo was a debated Mandela Effect since I always thought that they used a cornucopia in their logo. I also explored a similar topic in my last blog, where I explored the phenomenon of “collective memory,” which is the collective memory of a group or society. I did not account for these “false memories,” so I am glad I was able to learn about it through this blog. The government experiment theory is compelling since the government is known to hide media when running a social experiment. I thought back to the TikTok ban at the beginning of this year, which was speculated to have been done to control the spread of information. Thanks for sharing Elsa!
ReplyDeleteHi Elsa! I love how you talked about the Mandela effect cause it's still a mystery to me how we almost all remember something but then now we see it as something entirely different. However I had never heard about Curious George’s tail. I guess I was one of the people who did not experience that Mandela Effect because I do not remember him ever having a tail. I love the little theories you crafted and the one that brings the most attention to me is the third one you mentioned: Parallel Universes. I do not know if you or anyone else in this class is familiar with Gloom and LaurenZside but years ago they made a video together talking about different conspiracy theories, and one of the things they mentioned was the Berenstain bears and they remember different versions of it. They said that someone dropped one of their Berenstein books while ours was Berenstain books and so it got people confused. I don’t really care if it's Berenstain instead of Berenstein because I’m still going to say it wrong cause it sounds better.
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